1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to wireless communications and more particularly to short message service between various types of computing devices and mobile handsets.
2. Description of Related Art
Short Message Service (SMS) is implemented by wireless carriers to allow text messages to be sent to and from cellular phones within a predefined geographic region or across international boundaries. SMS messages generally have the following characteristics: recipient phone number, text message and sender number. The recipient phone number is typically a number which adheres to international dialing plan features, namely a country code plus country specific number. The sender number can have one of two forms: a full international dialing plan number, or a short code. Short codes are usually unique only within a given geographic region such as a country and typically are 4, 5, 6 or more digits in length.
For mobile-to-mobile SMS (messages from one cellular phone to another cellular phone), the sender number is the international dialing plan number of the sending cellular phone. For computer application-to-mobile SMS, the sender number can be either an international dialing plan number or a short code. For computer applications, it is desirable to be able to send an SMS message (mobile terminated message) to a cellular phone, and have the recipient provide a responding SMS message back (mobile originated message) to the application. It is common for computer applications to generate multiple messages to any given recipient in which case it is important for proper operation of the computer application to be able to uniquely relate any given response (mobile originated message) from the recipient to a given application-generated message (mobile terminated message). Unfortunately, the order in which the recipient replies to messages, and the order in which the wireless carrier network delivers the replies back to the application can be random, and there is no information present in the SMS message returned to the application which identifies which mobile terminated message the response was associated with.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a system and method in which computer application-generated mobile terminated messages can have uniquely associated mobile originated responses.